Welcome to the 38th edition of The Pulse, your bi-weekly newsletter of Insights for Strategy Leaders. And welcome to all of the new subscribers since the last edition!
In this edition:
- 🎯 Prioritizing What Matters in a World Obsessed with Urgency
- 🍿 Strategy Snacks on Prioritization
- 📚 Related Resources
Let's jump in.
Prioritizing What Matters in a World Obsessed with Urgency
“Our priorities are defined by the fire burning brightest in a given week.”
“The loudest voice in the room usually owns what we discuss.”
“Employees are struggling with prioritization. They don’t know how to sift through what’s most important over what someone is telling them is most urgent.”
Just in the past month, I’ve heard these statements from Strategy and Operations Leaders struggling to balance what’s important versus what’s urgent.
And let me be clear, important and urgent can co-exist.
However, it’s a common struggle for organizations to cut through the noise and discern how to appropriately prioritize the right work.
While there can be a number of reasons for this lack of clarity, I want to focus on three questions that every Strategy and Operations Leader should ask themselves.
So let's jump into question #1.
1) Have Leaders set a strategy to align their operating plan with employee priorities?
This might seem basic, but so often we come across organizations that have set an operating plan or proforma approved by their Board, yet that plan isn’t a strategy.
It is a set of numbers that we want to achieve, usually built around selling more, growing faster, and/or being more efficient.
And there is no clear definition of how that happens for employees.
An organization will have revenue or fundraising targets, but no direction or Themes that employees can anchor on to align their priorities towards influencing those targets.
So, success gets measured by a long list of to-dos—or by whoever shouts the loudest.
2) Are you focused on Outcomes or Outputs?
For many organizations, this is a journey, not a destination. As you shift towards prioritizing the right initiatives, it will beg the question of how any priority impacts the targets you are trying to achieve as a business.
If you focus only on the urgent, your employees will spend their time on transactional tasks instead of purposeful work.
However, we don’t want to pretend as though most organizations have an outcome-driven mindset. In fact, this is likely a culture shift and behavior change for many companies.
Yet, it’s important to start shifting towards setting Objectives that have clear outcomes.
Even if you’re nervous to put a number on something, because it forces a new level of accountability, it’s the only way you will empower your employees to say ‘not now’ to certain initiatives that distract from the important.
We want to drive a culture focused on moving the needle. Taking on the mission critical work that drives impact over work that allows us to simply check off a laundry list of to-do items.
If you haven’t already focused on Outcomes in how you’ve built your strategy, start by simply trying to get 30% of all your Objectives to have a clear, measurable outcome. Each quarter try to move that percentage up 10% until you’ve finally moved to a culture where you can measure impact of work across the organization.
3) Do you create space for disruptions?
After working with hundreds of Strategy and Operations Leaders, and reviewing thousands of Strategic Plans, one thing I can say for certain is that the best strategies won’t look the same at the end of the year as they did at the beginning.
Strategic Planning should be dynamic, not static, which means creating space to evaluate whether to persist or pivot in the Objectives or Tactics that have been set in helping us achieve our goals.
But when organizations hear about the need to be dynamic, they often assume it means reacting to every fire that pops up. 🔥 Adding every new initiative or tactic to our strategy.
But as we’ve shared before, creating a space to be more dynamic in how we set and execute our strategy isn’t about saying ‘yes’ to everything. Often, it means having a healthy conversation that results in ‘not now.’
Yet, if we don’t create the space to have these conversations, then we won't make changes as needed, or worse, we will fall victim to allowing the urgent to override the important.
Further, we will create priority fatigue across our teams.
The operating plan and targets you set out for the year likely won’t change. But the means and methods by which we set out to reach those goals will likely need to adjust as we receive more information throughout the year.
As an example, maybe your strategy incorporated the expansion into a new market, but that fell by the wayside once you realized there was an opportunity to productize a service offering to your existing customers.
Don’t just keep marching towards new market expansion. Adjust your Objectives as needed, and most importantly, communicate those changes to employees.
And I don’t just mean tell them what’s happening. Give them context.
As Leaders we often overlook the ‘why’ and go straight to the ‘how’, falsely assuming everyone has the same level of context that we have in making decisions.
We’ve spoken a lot about building in rituals to your company’s operating cadence, and reviewing whether to persist or pivot each quarter is a great way to shift towards a more proactive approach to your strategic planning.
Related: Guide to Building a Successful Operating Rhythm
Shift from Transactional Tasks to Purposeful Work
Shifting to a culture that prioritizes what’s important over what’s urgent won’t happen overnight.
However, the results are clear.
Better cross-department collaboration, greater transparency, and an increased level of accountability are just the starting points for the impact this commitment can have at any organization.
As a Strategy and Operations Leader, I hope these questions helped identify areas of strength or opportunities as we move forward in executing our Strategy with conviction.
🍿 Strategy Snacks: Prioritization 101
Back with the snacks - these centered around... you guessed it... prioritization!
